Yes. Mody had the sense to emigrate and stay emigrated. Dinyar Patel, a Parsi historian born in American, did not even though he has degrees from Harvard and Stanford. He remains in a country he fucking hates.
He writes in the LARB of
Missed Opportunities and Underdevelopment: On Ashoka Mody’s “India Is Broken”
TO JUDGE BY recent headlines, this seems to be India’s moment.
No. India is doing well under the BJP, which will get a third term, but it will be many years before the country will have much impact on the world stage.
“India is a true bright spot in the midst of a global downturn,” CNBC declared after last January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, where CEOs waxed eloquent about the country’s digital infrastructure and its prospects as a microchip manufacturing hub.
Sadly, there's many a slip between the cup and that particular lip- as Intel is realizing. Perhaps current vulnerabilities will only be overcome when a next-gen constellation of technologies appears.
“Western leaders are making a sensible bet on India,” pronounced the Financial Times in July.
Sadly, they don't have the money to do much in the way of making bets. There will have to be substantial retrenchment. Voters must be persuaded to take more pain in return for, not gain, but a managed decline in material standards of living for the vast majority.
With the country’s young population, democratic political tradition, growing military prowess, and robust GDP growth, how could it not make sense to cultivate economic and strategic ties with New Delhi?
Why do what is sensible? Why not just concentrate on virtue signaling? Alienate India now, rather than wait to do it later on. Save yourself some time.
Not to be outdone, several Indian outlets in late November latched onto a report issued by an American credit rating agency. “China slows, India grows,” they beamed, reinforcing a long-standing hope about the “India story”—that the Indian tortoise would eventually outperform the Chinese hare.
Nobody gives a fuck about stories or narratives or other such stupid lies.
Amid such boosterism and bullishness comes
Eeyore. Hopefully Winne the Pooh will give him some money.
Ashoka Mody’s new book India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today, a scathing account of how, since independence in 1947, India’s story has actually been
the story of a Dynasty. If Rahul weren't so utterly shit, the BJP would not have got majorities in the last two elections. This time they might go 'char sau paar'- i.e. get a big enough majority to change the constitution as was the Dynasty's wont.
characterized by gross economic mismanagement,
because the Dynasty doesn't understand Econ
systemic corruption,
because the Dynasty and its sycophants are greedy
dashed democratic hopes,
Dynasticism is the opposite of Democracy
and state-sponsored violence.
Nehru presided over a massive pogrom of Muslims in Delhi itself. Indira attacked the Golden Temple and Rajiv presided over a massive pogrom of Sikhs in Delhi. Subsequently, because of Rajiv's corruption, Congress could never form a government on its own. Nor could the BJP till Rahul fucked up Congress by neither taking the top job nor letting any one else on his side have it. This continues to be the case.
An extremely depressing book,
It is funny if you know anything about India.
narrating a history of missed opportunities
Mody was too stupid to rise up as a techie. He was so useless, the spent time at the World Bank and the IMF. To be clear, a smart guy who went to IIT and got to the States, should have become a billionaire by now. No wonder Mody is bitter.
and lagging development,
the Dynasty wanted to keep India barefoot and pregnant. Sadly, the son of a chai-wallah had other ideas.
it is not the account that promoters of the “world’s largest democracy” and the “world’s fasting-growing economy” would want to gain traction.
Nobody gives a fuck what narrative or account gains tractions. Indians are perfectly happy to finance India's infrastructure expansion though, no doubt, they may prefer to have a foreign passport and use offshore investment vehicles.
And that is precisely why India Is Broken is essential reading.
Only if you hate India and are in deep mourning that Modi is going to get re-elected.
Mody writes with righteous indignation,
but without intelligence. He was wrong about the Euro and thus has to turn his gaze back to India to continue to be a prophet of doom.
providing a necessary antidote to PR and puff pieces,
which were paid for. Who is paying Mody?
Davos showmanship and smug complacency about India’s inevitable rise.
Is Modi complacent? That is the only question which matters. After ten years in power, Modi sees that India needs a 25 year plan. His Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra is just the start.
He condemns nearly all of India’s major leaders—from the liberal doyen Jawaharlal Nehru
who wasn't liberal. He centralized power, jailed his opponents, presided over massacres of Muslims and Communists, sanctioned the invasion of Goa and amended the Constitution after the Bench upheld freedom of speech.
to the right-wing authoritarian Narendra Modi
sadly, Modi was less right-wing than Manmohan in terms of economic policy. But this was because he had some actual authority. Manmohan was a puppet.
—for having failed dramatically at one essential task: generating enough jobs for their citizens.
This cretin doesn't get that it isn't the Government's job to generate jobs. Its job is to actually do something useful with the money it confiscates from those who have jobs. At times this may involve helping entrepreneurs create jobs by jailing or killing gangsters or 'activists'' of various types. But, at other times, it may involve destroying employment in repugnant, rent-extracting, involuted, or otherwise stagnant branches of the economy.
That failure has stemmed from an almost allergic aversion toward investment in public goods.
Nonsense! India wants to invest in the most important public goods- Defense and Law & Order. Club goods which are defective- e.g. Government schools from which the teachers play truant- have no constituency.
India’s relative underdevelopment is the result of its neglect of primary and secondary education,
No. Both are irrelevant. Illiterate kids can be productive enough provided some with minimal literacy help coordinate their activity. This is also the reason a guy who is a Doctor in his own country might emigrate to a higher wage country where he is functionally illiterate and digs ditches under the supervision of a minimally literate gang-leader who communicates in pidgin.
quality healthcare,
which costs money. If you can earn more than you need to spend on food, it is worth your while to spend on health care and even on self-improvement- i.e. education of some useful sort.
Dinyar thinks England got rich by investing in education and healthcare rather than sending women and children down coal mines. His knowledge of History is zero.
and the other infrastructure,
there was too little investment in highways, railways, ports etc but this was because of export pessimism and the small size of the local market.
amenities, and services necessary to create livable, efficient cities.
It is obvious how you get livable, efficient, cities. You use an internal passport system or otherwise ensure that 'congestible' resources are safeguarded for those who paid for the underlying 'club goods'. Otherwise, there is a tragedy of the commons. There are other problems to do with the incentive incompatibility of the municipal planning and executive functions but the solutions aren't rocket science.
(Appropriately enough, I read part of Mody’s book while sweating through a five-hour power outage in central Mumbai.)
That may have been because of a technical fault. The West Side of Manhattan had a five-hour outage in 2019. Commercial electricity providers- e.g. Tata Power- only started operating in Mumbai some fifteen years ago.
One can quibble about Mody’s treatment of particular Indian prime ministers, but it is hard to dispute his core argument.
He has no argument. He doesn't get that it is very peculiar for a Democracy to have a Dynastic Premiership.
Today’s breathless media reports have pointed to GDP growth as evidence of India’s economic performance. By shifting the focus to job creation, Mody develops a revisionist account of the India story while posing some hard questions.
Modi can't get rid of stupid labor laws for the same reason he can't get rid of stupid farm laws. Still, the States can do a lot to help themselves. But this may involve beating Trade Unionists or telling the Bench to go fuck itself. Nobody can stop Development provided those who want to develop can pay people to kill or chase away those who stand in the way. The trouble is, people don't enjoy killing or paying for it to be done. Why not try to emigrate instead? Go to places where the killing was done very thoroughly way back when and, later, people like Reagan and Thatcher had been able to triumph without bloodshed.
Why has India prioritized types of economic development that have come with limited job creation and high environmental costs?
It hasn't. At Independence, everybody wanted a Government job, preferably one where they could extort bribes, and the bureaucracy was expanded towards that end. There were also plenty of opportunities to rise by being an activist or virtue signaler. But such activity was parasitic and thus self-limiting. India 'grew by night' or by gangsterism of one type or another.
How have policymakers in New Delhi failed to learn simple lessons about human development from neighbors like China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh?
Policymakers know that some Indian states have teachers and Doctors who don't mind working in rural or semi-rural areas. Others don't because the locals consider it great fun to tie them to a tree and make them watch as their wives and daughters are raped. The point about shit-holes is that people run away from them or only stay so as to rape or get raped. Still, it's good to know that Dinyar thinks India should imitate Xi's China or Hasina's Bangladesh. What he doesn't notice is that China, Vietnam and Bangladesh had to fight actual armies to get independence. India got handed the thing on a plate. India is simply less cohesive though, equally, it is much much less coercive.
Do politicians even want to provide citizens with quality education and healthcare?
Does Dinyar? He teaches shite to cretins. But then he is himself a shitty cretin.
In Mody’s view, India’s inability to provide public goods and generate employment is the logical result of seven decades of worsening corruption, a disintegrating social fabric, acute policymaking shortsightedness, and very misplaced priorities.
If so, Mody must think Indian independence was a very bad idea. Since he wasted little time in emigrating to America, I suppose we can't accuse him of inconsistency.
Still, there can be no doubt that Nehru and his descendants have set the agenda for India since 1928. Still, autocracy is tempered by assassination and so India has risen a little since Rajiv was blown up.
It all began, he tells us, with Nehru. As India’s first prime minister, Nehru dashed the hopes of a new nation by spouting socialist rhetoric but failing to implement socialist policies.
He certainly dashed the hopes of the Muslims and the Communists. But this suited the Hindu majority. Sadly, Nehru implemented Socialist policies- stupid ones- but they didn't matter very much. What people wanted was the freedom to do stupid shit.
Nehru was conscious of the successful economic policies of Meiji-era Japan but instead pushed the country down a disastrous path of state-led heavy industry,
Japan had done that but quickly privatized so as to get back revenue for more of the same. That's how the zaibatsu were created. Industrialists assumed the same thing would happen in India. The Government could borrow more cheaply and do land acquisition, technology transfer etc, better. Then it could recoup its investment by selling to Tata or Birla or Bajaj etc.
which generated neither jobs nor the type of fast-paced growth that was just beginning in East Asian economies.
Because of 'export pessimism' and the decision to strangle the 'wage good' sector which could have generated export-led growth. Mody is too fucking stupid to contribute any insight in this respect. People like Bhagwati & Manmohan are still alive.
And he pursued what Mody terms a “temples strategy”: investing in flashy symbolic projects like big dams, research laboratories, and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) rather than more nuts-and-bolts things like schoolhouses and village-level medical facilities.
The States had been doing so even prior to dyarchy. But if village schools and medical facilities were shit because teachers and doctors ran away, nobody wanted more tax money to go to them. Jack Prager, an economist turned medical doctor who worked in India explains this in plain terms. Mody is simply ignorant. There was nothing wrong with big projects. Where Nehru failed was in setting up a tech and management cadre to make such things profitable. The IAS strangled such things at birth. Thus, privatization was the only option. Mody still doesn't get this.
Private business reeled from overregulation and state control, but their complaints were merely screams into the void in an era when Nehru enjoyed unchallenged political influence.
Fuck off! Rajaji set up a right-wing political party. Charan Singh and other farmer's leaders told Nehru to shove his Agricultural Cooperatives up his Brahminical arsehole. Indira outflanked both the Left and the Right by appealing to 'Harijans' and Muslims and the poor- i.e. almost everybody. Still, beating and killing was what gave her the 'Goddess Durga' image.
A growing number of historians have picked apart these rather straightforward narratives about Nehruvian socialism. Was Nehru’s assessment about the transformative qualities of heavy industry too rosy? Yes, but there was broad consensus among Indian leaders, both before and after independence, that heavy industry was the way to go.
No. Heavy industry pays for itself if the 'downstream' is built up. It was possible this could be done by dedicated public servants but no such beasties exist in any substantial numbers. The alternative was privatization. But, to be frank, Indian entrepreneurship was pretty shitty back then. There had to be a shakeout. Bureaucratic Socialism may have delayed it but it was bound to happen.
Could Nehru be dismissive of private enterprise? Absolutely, but his policies could also be surprisingly pro-business, as Taylor C. Sherman has recently noted, and his government took a cautious path on nationalization.
There was a fundamental right to property back then. Grabbing stuff involved paying compensation. That's why Communism was popular. What is the point of stealing if you get billed for what you steal?
Nor is it entirely correct to assume that business and the state were at opposite ideological poles during the 1950s and ’60s.
Foreign Managing Agencies were at the opposite pole from the State and those who had financed the rise of its leaders.
India’s biggest businessmen, after all, practically begged for state-led economic planning.
Nonsense! They wanted yet more protection and the Government to do all the work, take the downside and then provide free money, fellatio, and nice fluffy pillows as and when required. By contrast, the righteous leaders of the revolting proletariat wanted free money, fellatio and slightly less fluffy pillows because fluffiness is totes bougie.
As Ramachandra Guha has argued, a 1944 document known as the Bombay Plan “gives the lie to the claim that Jawaharlal Nehru imposed a model of centralized economic development on an unwilling capitalist class.”
Guha appears to be unaware that the Indian capitalist class, back then, featured a lot of Scottish and Jewish and Armenian dudes not just Parsis and Marwaris. Sadly, thanks to Hitler and Tojo, only the US remained as the source of Capital. That's where Nehru's 'Discovery of India' was useful. Americans reading it assumed Nehru would borrow on Wall Street to pay for turnkey projects from GE & Dow Chemicals. They didn't care if such enterprises started off in the public or private sector. Stalin had been a great customer of the big American corporations during the worst days of the Depression.
India’s reluctance to engage with the global economy in the 1950s and ’60s stemmed from
the weakness of its own entrepreneurial class who preferred the 'best of monopoly profits- viz. a quiet life' by having the domestic market to themselves.
a much longer tradition of “swadeshi,” or economic self-reliance,
Fuck off! India wasn't even politically self-reliant under the Brits. Nehru would turn it into a vast begging bowl.
a noble idea that did not always make economic sense and could, at its worst extremes, veer into outright xenophobia.
Which is why Indian were so keen on 'phoren maal' and degrees from Western Universities.
Did Nehru neglect primary and secondary education as well as public health?
Education and Health were State subjects though on the concurrent list. This meant the Center could develop 'institutions of national importance and set guidelines of various types.
Certainly. But he was hardly alone in this regard, and some of his colleagues were even more shortsighted. While he was chief minister of Madras state in the early 1950s, C. Rajagopalachari
whose daughter had married Gandhi's son.
slashed educational funding and shunted schoolchildren into hereditary caste-based occupational training run by parents.
Since he was a Brahmin, this was a fatal mistake. Anti-Brahminism is still the gift which keeps giving to Tamil politicians.
Rajagopalachari became the leader of the “free economy” opposition to Nehru in the late 1950s, which, as Aditya Balasubramanian has pointed out, was downright regressive when it came to traditional hierarchies and caste-based inequality.
That's the only reason it could get some votes. But the future lay with the dominant agricultural castes led by people like Charan Singh.
Nehru at least tried to tackle these problems, albeit with very mixed results.
Establishing a dynasty is not a 'mixed result'. It is about as regressive as you can get.
None of this excuses Nehru’s blind spots, but it does point to a wider political landscape where provision of basic public goods was, surprisingly, not always an urgent priority.
If there is no money, provision of anything other than bullshit will be low. The only urgent priority for a poor country is to stop being so fucking poor. This involves raising productivity which can either be done by the carrot or the stick. Bullshitting doesn't help.
It is harder to disagree with Mody’s treatment of Nehru’s successors. Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, embraced populist policies, let corruption flourish, and did so little for education that—incredibly—the number of illiterates in India actually grew on her watch.
Because illiterates had more babies who had more babies who were equally illiterate. The thing to do was to get rural girls into big factory dormitories till demographic transition was achieved.
Her contempt for democracy led to the Emergency in 1975–77,
No. Indira had contempt for Gandhian agitators because she well knew that the Brits had been able to put them down with insulting ease. Nutters like JP were foolish enough to believe that 'satyagraha' and 'bhoodan' had achieved marvelous things. Indira wasn't quite that foolish.
when thousands of political prisoners were crowded into India’s fetid jails in the name of an economic development that never materialized.
They were jailed in the name of what Vinobha Bhave called 'anushasan'- discipline.
One person, at least, secured a good job: her son, Sanjay, India’s poster boy for 1970s nepotism. Sanjay, who compensated for his mediocre intelligence with shocking ruthlessness, was put in charge of a slew of projects ranging from the construction of an automobile composed entirely of Indian materials and technology (an abject failure) to the violent dispossession of poor people (a marked success). After he died in a fiery plane crash while stunt flying over Delhi, one of his own relatives eulogized him thus: his passing “saved the nation from great tragedy.”
The truth was Indira needed Sanjay. He engineered her return to power. He handpicked Bhrindinwale. Had he not died, he would have managed him well enough. Zail and Buta Singh, being 'lower caste' could not do so. This is what got his Mummy killed. It must be said Indira probably only held elections because she thought one of Sanju's friends would arrange a convenient 'accident' for her.
Following the lead of economists such as Robert Solow, Amartya Sen, and Jean Drèze,
shitheads all. Growth or Development is about mimetic effects. It has no mathematical model.
Mody is skeptical about the palliative effects of free-market reforms, finding them quite ineffective without sufficient provision of public goods.
Which is like saying, getting a job is quite ineffective in raising your standard of living unless you get lots of money.
For this reason, he is quite critical of P. V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, prime ministers who are otherwise applauded for their policies of economic liberalization.
Why did they not fuck over the economy for some high minded reason? It's not as though they were Punjabi- like Manmohan or Montek. Indeed, being Brahmins, they had a duty to shit on the Indian economy and to destroy national security.
According to Mody, they took the “minimal steps to promote a market economy,” and their efforts resulted in very little job creation.
Because they couldn't reform the labor laws. But that is better left to the States.
Worse still, they let corruption and the political-criminal network fester while paying scant attention to human development.
Yet human development went up. A cat may pay attention to the King, but it can't alter the policies of the Crown.
Manmohan Singh’s prime ministership saw the job-demand backlog balloon
opulence has to increase before unemployment can rise in a very poor country.
while a handful of politicians and business oligarchs raked in fortunes.
They would have raked in bigger fortunes if there had been thoroughgoing reform and hundreds of millions of jobs in the formal sector had been created. The demand for equity, diversity and inclusiveness has left India poor and overpopulated.
Indian elites sequestered themselves in gated communities or emigrated.
So did non-elite people who could find a way to do so.
This environment was ripe, Mody continues, for the “Gujarat model” touted by Narendra Modi, who became prime minister in 2014 while promising to create millions of jobs.
The 'Gujarat model' involved doing a deal with farmers such that they gave up 'free' electricity in return for actual electricity. Any State can rise up if it does sensible things. But, the Center can't push through things like the farm laws. This has to be left to the States.
The Gujarat model matched favors and handouts to big business with neglect of health and education,
Health and education only get 'neglected' by the Government if teachers and Doctors in the public sector are useless and can't be sacked. Voters stop wanting to finance that shite.
and—you might now notice a pattern—it failed to generate sufficient jobs.
The pattern Dinyar has noticed is that jobs are lacking when education and health are neglected. He doesn't get that both are only neglected if there is no fucking money.
Jobs exist where labor is productive. You can be very educated and healthy- Dinyar is probably both- while being utterly unproductive because what you choose to do is stupid shit.
Modi’s aggressive ideology of Hindutva,
Hindus should not form an orderly queue in order to get their kaffir heads chopped off
meanwhile, fed upon the simmering frustrations of millions of unemployed or underemployed young Indians.
Communism may have done so. Hindutva is cool with dudes setting up tea-shops so as to make a little money. It is not the job of the Capitalist or the Politician to give you a job and then wipe your bum if you refuse to do so because Management is not providing adequate remuneration for bum-wiping activities.
It does not take a historian or political scientist to
wipe Dinyar's bum. Entire Capitalist class must come and do so for him
realize that something is rotten in the state of Indian democracy today.
Dynasticism- more particularly if the heir to the throne is a moon-calf- is not compatible with democracy. Modi keeps winning because the alternative is Rahul.
Politicians charged with murder, rape, and worse
e.g. politicians who refuse to wipe Dinyar's bum
increasingly populate the halls of power.
from which Dinyar and his piteous demands that his shitty bum be wiped is firmly excluded. This is because Dinyar is not doing enough rape and murder- right?
They win elections by cynically dangling access to services that the state is already obliged to provide,
Not Modi. He proactively enrolls beneficiaries (labharthis) through road shows like his 'Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra'. Dinyar hasn't noticed that 'last mile delivery' has become the name of the game.
but which they can turn on and off depending on voters’ whims.
Dinyar means 'politician's whims'. Why the fuck would voters have a whim to have their own entitlements 'turned off'? Clearly, the nutter doesn't read over his own shite.
India’s political discourse more and more revolves around questionable historical grievances rather than underperforming schools, increased poverty, toxic air quality, and anarchic urban development—not to mention erosion of fundamental rights and democratic norms.
Nonsense! Only 'last mile delivery' matters.
To observe the country today—with an eye cast to global comparisons—is to realize that Boss Tweed
whose power arose from his ability to create government jobs for his voters
was a paragon of ethical behavior when placed next to many of India’s elected representatives;
He stole money and died in jail. Nobody suggests that Indian courts are as efficient as nineteenth century American ones. But that is also true of twenty first century American courts.
that the industrial slums of 19th-century Manchester must have been lovely, airy places in comparison to the hovels in which millions live in Mumbai, Delhi, and elsewhere.
Back then Manchester was the highest value adding manufacturing city in the world. Naturally, its workers lived a lot better than those in backward countries. Plenty of 'workmen's cottages' in the UK now change hands for millions of pounds.
To be fair, Indian politicians, including those in the current government, have made notable investments in public goods in recent years, but nowhere near the amount of their peers in places like Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Bangladesh and Vietnam had to fight wars to liberate themselves. Still, it is good to know that Dinyar thinks India should abandon Democracy.
How did all of this come to pass?
There is no point investingg in public schools and hospitals if you can't sack teachers who don't teach and doctors who don't show up for work. But this is also the reason the organized sector can't create jobs directly. Once a guy is a permanent employee, you can't sack him. He will only turn up for work in if he can steal stuff or play cards away from the scolding of his wife.
Mody’s narrative is particularly depressing for those of us who study India’s anti-colonial nationalist movement.
The Brits wanted to transfer power. They did so. Even Gandhi could not avert this outcome.
The first generation of anti-colonial leaders made popular education one of their central demands.
Some parts of India got it- by paying poor families to send their kids to school till the thing had become normative. Other parts of India tried 'Basic education' but gave up because it was crap. Still, from 1923 onward, any part of India which wanted it (and which would impose a cess on alcohol or some such thing) could have had it. But, if the returns to education were low, there was no fucking education.
As early as 1882, some of them called for universal, state-sponsored education.
But they refused to demand the taxes which would have paid for it. On the other hand, the demand that Death be abolished was cruelly rejected by Viceroy Sahib who was in the pay of the undertaker's cartel.
Decades before terms like human development and human capital were invented, Indian nationalists were arguing for them, excoriating the British Raj for denying skills training, vocational education, and job opportunities to their subjects.
They were lying. Indians were welcome to raise funds for any of these things. The District Collector could sanction 'adwabs' or cesses of this nature. Indeed, arguably, such things had existed in the pre-British era. After 1923, elected Indians did increase spending on education and public health. But the return on both were low. Why buy medicine for your wife or child? You could always get more of such commodities. Similarly, why educate your workers? You just need one guy who can read and write and keep the books.
Once they established the Indian National Congress Party in 1885,
it was established by a British Civil Servant
they charged the colonial government with corruption at its highest and lowest levels
No. Some may have told lies of that sort but most Congressmen were ultra-loyalist.
(colonial officials, for their part, returned the favor: one memorably described the Congress under Mahatma Gandhi as “Tammany Hall presided over by St. Francis of Assisi”).
Dinyar may have found this memorable. Nobody else did.
Mody dismisses the role of caste in explaining policy choices.
He is a cretin. India has a huge affirmative action program, which is why it is so shit.
But caste actually has a big role in explaining India’s fractured democracy and its meager provision of public goods.
If you promote the educationally backward, you increase stupidity.
And caste bias played a formative role in modern India’s political evolution. India’s anti-colonial leaders might have talked about popular education, but they became more circumspect when Dalit and lower-caste students hovered around the threshold of the schoolhouse.
Why? They could set up schools for their own caste fellows and then try to enroll rich kids from other castes. Still, Dinyar is right about the need for RSS schools where the anti-caste Hindutva ideology is propagated.
Such prejudice was common in other forms of liberalism around the world in the 19th century. It was more egregious in the 20th.
No. Speaking generally, it was much less so.
By the time of independence, B. R. Ambedkar, the towering Dalit intellectual and politician, worried deeply about how caste would undermine those essential building blocks of democracy: liberty, equality, and fraternity (this is a central theme in Ashok Gopal’s wonderful new biography of Ambedkar).
He was anti-Congress and pro-British. His mistake was to think the Muslim League would give Dalits a better deal. Still, he ensured that Muslim Dalits would be stripped of affirmative action.
How were equality and fraternity possible when Dalit students were still turned away from schools and when upper-caste doctors refused to provide them with life-saving medical intervention?
Most Dalits were poor just like most upper caste people. That's what kept them from getting education, health, and nice food to eat.
Caste-based prejudice continued to affect the provision of public goods by the time American political scientist Myron Weiner published The Child and the State in India in 1991.
Some parts of India don't have caste. They too have low provision of public goods because they too are as poor as shit. The reason Weiner's book had an impact on India because the reform of trade policy meant that India could do export led growth. In this context a couple of years of education- especially for girls- could raise productivity. This is because School may not teach you how to read, but it gets you used to the idea that you can't piss and shit anytime you want to. This matters if you work on an assembly line or join the Foreign Service.
Weiner’s book, perhaps as depressing as Mody’s, demonstrated how Indian elites and policymakers unabashedly saw educational access as a lever to maintain class and caste hierarchies in Indian society.
Weiner didn't understand that education is a State subject. Some states had greatly expanded educational access and enrollment. Others hadn't. Some 'backward caste' administrations were worse in this respect than those ruled by 'forward' castes.
Since then, India has achieved near-universal primary school enrollment, a commendable feat
This cretin doesn't understand that half of all kids go to private schools. In more prosperous states, like Goa, the figure is 83 percent. In Kerala, which gets a lot of remittances from the Gulf, it is 73 percent. In poorer states like Bihar and West Bengal it is about 14 percent. I should mention that school enrollment in some States is 110 percent. In other words, the Government's figures inflate public school enrollment.
—but this masks a reality where too many government schools are plagued by low-performing or absent teachers, regimens of meaningless rote learning, and terrible infrastructure.
Because you can't sack those teachers- who also count the votes in elections.
Access to quality education is the new lever of control and differentiation.
It is in private hands.
What is the way forward?
Transfer rural girls into giant factory dormitories. Gain demographic transition. Rising productivity means rising real wages which means that people pay to get their kids edumicated. They can pay into collective health insurance schemes. Most importantly, they can run away from casteist shitholes to places which are slightly better run.
Mody suggests that radical decentralization of power in India is the “best and perhaps only hope for cleaning its rot in politics.”
He is a fool. It is obvious that 'radical decentralization' means some places will be run by psychotic nutters.
He cites the southern state of Kerala as an example of how local self-government can boost accountability and public goods provision.
Why do 73 percent of kids go to private schools if local government is so good. Under the CPM, Kerala's higher education system has become criminalized and corrupt. If you belong to the right party and are good at stabbing people you can get a PhD even if you are illiterate.
But Kerala has benefited from decades of vigorous social reform and grassroots political activism.
No. That's why Keralites have to emigrate. The place survives on remittances. The trouble is that since Keralites are smart and enterprising, they are increasingly shifting to advanced countries or putting down roots in places like Dubai. This means, as the parents or grandparents die off, there is no one left back home to send money back to. There are now 1.3 million empty houses in Kerala (i.e. one in ten, assuming average family size of 3.5) and thus State revenue is collapsing.
In less-developed West Bengal, by contrast, local devolution of power has been accompanied by shocking levels of political violence: gangland wars over resources and power.
Shashi Tharoor complains of shocking levels of political violence in Kerala.
To be successful, decentralization must be coupled with a progressive political impulse, one that affirms, as Ambedkar recognized, the interconnected principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity for all Indians.
Fuck off! To be successful, a thing has to be implemented by smart people not crazy commies or bullshitters like Dinyar.
Politicians must aggressively prioritize equality over maintenance of traditional social hierarchies.
No. Politicians must do sensible things. Keralites kept fucking off to places ruled by smart Arab Sheikhs who maintained the traditional social hierarchy.
And that will be a tall order.
It will be a fucking wank.
India Is Broken is a brave book,
because Biden will send the Secret Service to beat and sodomize Mody for writing against India- right?
flying in the face of both the chest-thumping nationalist narrative of a rising India
which is good for India. What Mody is doing is bad for everybody save cunts like Dinyar.
and the collective wisdom of various finance bros,
i.e. guys who make money. Money is very evil. Everybody should teach stupid shit to imbeciles.
investment gurus, CEOs, and talking heads. Narendra Modi has proclaimed India a “vishwaguru,” a glorious civilization that can be a teacher to the world.
Why does he not call it a stinking shit-hole? Fuck is wrong with that man? Also, he should convert to Islam and have gender re-assignment surgery. So should Biden.
Ashoka Mody would instead suggest that India take a seat in the classroom and learn some basic lessons in development from its more prosperous, egalitarian neighbors
Hilarious! Modi should learn from Sheikh Hasina. That way the Opposition will boycott the elections. After that, Modi should create a one-party state of the sort they have in Vietnam. God alone knows what goes on in Dinyar's classroom. Hopefully, his students will promote Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity by forcibly performing gender reassignment surgery upon him.
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